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In Nara prefecture there are many old residual houses which date back to the 17th century. The Akasuka residence in the city of Gose, is a townhouse which operated as an oil shop. The construction age is considered to be the end of the 17th […]

Renown as the largest timber framed building in England, the Harmondsworth Barn is considered a marvel of medieval carpentry. As an early 15th century structure, it was famously described by the poet John Betjeman as the ‘Cathedral of Middlesex’. The Grade 1 listed barn was […]

The hirose house is a late 17th century house from the Ymanashi prefecture before relocation to Japan open-air folk house museum. The structure employed in the Hirose house is typical of the folk houses of the Kōfu Bain. Typically, their gabled roofs are held up […]

The Aborfield barn from the 1500 utilises a typical medieval cruck frame structure. It was dismantled in 1977 and rebuilt as a museum in 1980 at the Chiltern open air museum where it currently stands. CRUCK FRAME STRUCTURE Cruck Frame construction was a typical wood […]

Surrounding the exposed post and beam wooden structure of the traditional house are a number of common features which have been modified over a long history to create a style characterized by refined elegance. Some of these distinctive elements are as follows: HISASHI […]

Before the industrialization of wooden buildings, wood construction can be generalised into two categories: block work and post construction. Block work construction utilised stack logs while post construction formed a type of palisade structure to support a roof. The wooden elements used in these structures […]

As of 2020, there are predicted to be 10 million empty homes across the archipelago according to the Japanese economist and real estate consultant Tomohiro Makino. Akiya, the Japanese word for empty house is the focus of this analysis in his book “Akiya Mondai”.[1] Although […]

With the number of prefabricated homes produced yearly in the past twenty years hovering around the 200,000 unit mark [Figure 44], there is a stable business to be attended to. However these numbers for the prefabricated housing industry in Japan are largely monopolised by the […]

Moving onto the 20th century, a resurgence of massive wood design occurred through the invention of new laminating and steel fastening technology. Rather than utilising natural large dimensional lumber, new technology takes the smaller, cheaper and more readily available dimensional lumber and combines it together […]

Wood is one of the oldest building materials known to man. Utilized both aesthetically and economically in art, housing, furnishings and trade, the accumulated knowledge of this material is overwhelming. There are 20 properties inscribed on the Japanese Unesco world heritage site list. From this […]